Harold and Maude And My Dad

In the summer of 1984, at the age of 12, my family forced me to move to a little town I had never heard of and didn't give a damn about.  At the time, we were living a miraculously happy and idyllic existence in the heart of Michigan's thumb region in a little berg known as Sandusky.  My school, my friends, my little league team and therefore my entire life was located squarely in Sandusky.  Moving was not an option.  How was I expected to survive?  Like virtually every middle-schooler in the history of time that has ever been forced to do anything they were not 100% thrilled with, I hated this idea.  More importantly, I hated my parents for coming up with the idea and loathed them still further for bringing the plan to fruition and relocating our family to some bullshit place.

The summer was rough and fall sucked once school started.  A ping pong table installed in the basement was about the only saving grace of our first few months in Bath, a tiny nothing of a town just north of East Lansing.  Change is difficult for any adolescent, but especially so for me.  New friends were made slowly and the reduction of my fury over the move cooled very, very slowly and the transition took even longer than under normal circumstances due to my self-inflicted emotional duress.

One Saturday evening after dinner, my Dad and I were down in the basement playing ping pong and talking intermittently.  He would ask about school or make inconsequential chit chat.  Every effort was being made to have a real conversation or to get me to open up, but I was having none of it.  Then at the end of a volley, a point which I won by the way, he asked if I wanted to go to a movie.

After a discussion of what the movie was called and what it was about, I was able to glean, basically, that my old man wanted to drag me out to see a movie about a teenager who befriends an old lady because he's depressed and lonely.  In fact, they begin their friendly bonds by running into one another at a funeral.  Old lady, weird friendship, depression, funerals for amusement - no thanks dude.

Was my father doing this because he thought of this as my way out?  I mean, I was depressed and lonely and perhaps he thought that I could start spending time with some old bitty in the neighborhood to make up for the fact that I hated my new school, I hated our new house and reminded my folks daily of the nearly complete absence of any friends within a 125 mile radius.  Let's just say I was dubious.

There were two factors that aligned to get me to the theater that night.  The first was that as an adolescent and young adult, I was absolutely terrible about telling people how I genuinely felt about stuff, if it made anyone feel bad; even when their feeling bad was my partial intent.  Therefore, the only way to get across the message of my lack of enthusiasm for this particular flick trip was to not react much to it all.  My physical reaction of indifference was then completely overwhelmed by factor number two; the movie didn't start until midnight.

Now as a twelve year old there was still some cache to being up past midnight.  This endeavor was fully two gears past that.  Not only would we be up past midnight, our thing didn't start until midnight.  And the event was outside the house!  As such I would be rolling home at 2:00 in the morning like a real, actual adult.  Dad thought I would like this thing so much, he was willing to take me out at the witching hour to see a weird movie at an arthouse theater to show it to me.  I tried to conceal my sudden and bursting desire to go, so I simply said, "That sounds like it might be alright".

The theater, called The Odeon, was incredibly small.  It was situated in a sort of strip mall sort of building and couldn't hold more than 60 or 70 people.  I remember the smells vividly; a concoction of popcorn, cigarettes and adulthood.  The seats creaked loudly when you pulled them down to sit and were filled with cracked tributaries of torn pleather.  Sticky sweet sheers of gum and sodas spills glazed the floor like a kind of carnival velcro.  After loading up on popcorn and Cokes, we found some creaky seats in which to park ourselves and sat down.  There might have been something like 20 other people in the room, but I really don't remember.  For the next two hours it was just me and Steve.

As much as the theater and time of night wowed me, I still had little or no hope for the movie.  The description left a lot to be desired and after my initiation to the after dark ambience of The Odeon I began to fixate on people and things in the theater that would hold my attention once I got bored from the lame picture.  I spent some time watching the older guy with a balding crown, beard and corduroy jacket laughing awkwardly with a lady much younger than he was.  It seemed likely that he was a professor at the college or something, but beyond that I was out of my element and not that interested.  Had this event taken place about four years later, I would have invented an entire Woody Allen film about him in my head.  Middle aged nerds, a couple of lonely women, and my Dad and I made up the rest of the crowd.

Over the next two hours I felt transformed.  If you've ever seen just a few minutes of Harold and Maude you know precisely what I'm talking about.  If you haven't seen it, there is no way for me to explain it to you.  I laughed at things that I had never imagined could possibly be funny.  The dark humor of the film and its myriad oddities spoke to me instantly.  Yet what I was mostly shocked by was that I had been brought to this movie by father - at midnight.

On the ride home I just felt happy.  Genuinely happy.  Other than going to a baseball game I could never remember another time when I felt like a friend to my Dad.  This however, was a different thing entirely.   My Dad had displayed the faith in me to share something weird and odd that he cared for in a sincere way as if to show me that he gave a damn.  He went out of his way to get me to laugh at life's absurdity and to take me to a place that I probably didn't belong at a time when I probably shouldn't be there.  He wanted to be my friend and to lift me up out of my shitty adolescent malaise that he surely felt some responsibility for.  While he may not know it, he succeeded admirably.

Now, I am the parent of adolescents.  With the perspective of parenthood, I know that whatever I got out of that night at the Odeon, my Dad got just as much if not more if he paid any attention at all.  It is my hope that someday, or if I am very lucky, maybe already, I have given my kids a moment something even close to this.  While this essay is meant to be a thank you to my Father for that night and what it means, perhaps the best thank you I could give to him would be to learn by his example.  Thanks Dad.